I’ve just updated the demo store with a release candidate version of ZenMagick 0.9.5.

There are some interesting visual and other changes that the demo store illustrates:

• Use of PDO based database API
• New plugin to switch between ZenMagick and Zen Cart template
• Improved event support for Zen Cart templates (that’s what the switch is really for!)
  The extended event support now allows ZenMagick plugins to manipulate the final HTML of Zen Cart templates. That means, all ZenMagick plugins that rely on this mechanism can now be used in Zen Cart templates, too! Obvious examples are the page stats and style switch plugin (even though the style switch doesn’t really work for Zen Cart templates, right now).

One thing that is now good to see is the difference in database queries. Even though the Zen Cart default template and the ZenMagick themes do not display exactly the same data, it’s still impressive to see the difference in queries

I somehow lost my release notes so the public release will have to wait until early next week to give me time to get organized again.

Happy demo’ing!

A while ago I wrote that I’ve been working on (yet) another implementation of the ZenMagick database API using PDO.

After some back and forth (the code was removed and readded yesterday) I’ve started working on that again. There are a couple good reasons for that.

Firstly, since Creole is not supported any more, having another implementation seems like a good idea. Secondly, it appears that it is quite a bit faster than Creole (and perhaps even Zen Cart’s $db).

I haven’t had a chance to verify this usingpages with lots of database access, since there are still bits missing in the implementation. The good news is, though, that the tests for ZMDatabase have been improved and extended in the process of filling the gaps.

In related news, I’ve decided (more or less) to make another change to the database API. This will only happen after 0.9.5 is released, though. The methods to control transactions are a bit clumsy and I hope that things will be a bit more intuitive in the future.

I’ve been pondering whether to have another release before Christmas for a while now and I think it would be a good idea. As far as releases go this is going to be a pretty minor one.

I spend a some time fixing some small things that croped up and als refactored a lot defines away (making them consts in service classes mostly). Some theme related defines about directory names got removed completely as they do not really change a lot (and shouldn’t either).

On the plus side there are going to be two new plugins. Firstly, the already annourced form handler and also the code I’ve been using on the demo store to switch themes.

There is also some new code in the form of new cache implementations and also a new ZMDatabase implementation using PDO.

The only real downside is that I’ve touched every single plugin. That in itself is probably not a bad thing, however the sourceforce file release interface requires to set platform and file type for each separately and that is a real pain.